Abstracting concrete materials

Contemporary poetry as a musical source

Abstract

This article summarizes a few ideas shared during lectures delivered at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Shenzhen and the Academy of Music at Hong Kong Baptist University in March 2024. Although there are existing publications focusing on my research in China and other projects as a composer working within the field of contemporary music composition, this focuses primarily on my musical output and research since coming to Germany five years ago, exploring contemporary poetry as a source of abstract musical thought. This brief explanation thus focuses on the technical and notational solutions which I have developed through interacting with poetry recitation, transcription and their derived parameters, as well as my goals behind this approach. I will first provide some general context, before moving on to musical strategies used in recent compositions based on texts by the Chinese poet Ruan Xuefang and the Iraqi poet Nadeem Al-Aloosi. Parallel to my time in China researching traditional music (ca. 2015-2019), I began to read contemporary poetry as a means of improving my Mandarin and broadening my understanding of modern China. It was in this way that I first encountered the work of Zheng Xiaoqiong: first, in translation, and, eventually, in the original. By 2017, we were in touch over WeChat, and, in 2018, she invited me to Guangdong Province to exchange for several days with other writers in the region. It was during this trip that I also became acquainted with the Shenzhen based Chaozhou dialect poet Ruan Xuefang.